


and it's a backwards country where you need to sleep together

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Brief mentions of gun violence, Dom/sub, F/M, Gen, Gen Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-07
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 04:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/557053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which sex is not a thing that they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and it's a backwards country where you need to sleep together

Rain in New York is nothing like rain in London, for starters. Rain is London’s natural element, its primordial state of being, its raison d’etre, even. Rain in New York feels—

“Dirty?” She asks with a blank face, no furrowing or twitching or angles to let him know what she’s thinking. It’s a skill she has unfortunately built up over extended exposure, and he hates it.

“Strange, maybe.” He keeps his voice level, because two can play at that particular game, but the expression that dawns on her face is one of affection and the slightest hint of pity, and it infuriates him that she can read him when he can’t do the same to her. He’s studied and reviewed and read up on muscle memory and body language and tone and microexpressions until his eyes feel like they are about to fall out of his head, and yet she can always tell when he’s homesick and he can’t always tell if she’s lying or not. Like the campfire story, or the one about where she got that scar — that had been a good one, he’d bought it hook line and sinker, and she’d laughed and laughed until she’d fallen out of the armchair. He felt the corner of his mouth twitch upward at the memory, sympathetic laughter, and shook his head. 

“Gyro?” She offers him the foil-wrapped monstrosity in her hand. He can smell the acid in the yogurt, the grease on the meat, the not-anywhere-close-to-ripe tomatoes stuffed in among the overabundance of lettuce.

“No.” 

She frowns at him. Well, he calls it a frown, it’s really a slight inward pinch of the eyebrows and a straight line of the mouth. It’s her frown, though, the one that means she wants him to do something for her and if it also happens to benefit him then so be it. She has a litany of frowns and not-quite-frowns for every occasion. It’s a gift, he’s decided, much like his own, and he envies it. “Fine.” He unwraps the foil carelessly, takes a giant bite, talks with his mouth full — it wouldn’t do to let her win so easily, after all.

—-

She stands differently one day, and he knows, and she knows he knows. “What model?” he asks, his tone as noncommittal as he can make it. 

She reaches into her waistband, behind her back, where she’d tucked it — under her long gray sweater, under her baggy burgundy shirt, just above the three interlocked tattoos she doesn’t think he knows about, and hands him the gun. It’s heavy, but not as heavy as it looks. “Chosen to intimidate an assailant without slowing you down while walking,” he says, peering at the matte carbon-fiber handle. “A clever choice, if a bit masculine.” He looks up sharply. “Guns in general are masculine, I meant. Not that your choice is particularly—”

“Whatever. Can I have it back, please?” She holds out one small, delicate hand, and the incongruity of the picture when he places the heavy, squared-off pistol back on her surgeon’s hands and long, thin fingers strikes him, knocks the breath out of him for a moment. “I have someone coming over, you may want to make yourself scarce.”

He doesn’t have someone coming over, not yet, but a quick phone call while Joan gathers her things and saunters off toward her preferred movie theater, and someone comes over. Not the same woman again, but a taller, Middle Eastern one, lithe and nimble and clever, and she stretches him up against the ladder and takes him apart with a smile on her face. He tips very, very well and makes a note of her name, and as she walks away he sees the tattoo across her back: a cobra and a woman sitting cross-legged and a phrase in Arabic he can’t puzzle out. “Note to self: learn Arabic.”

—-

The first time he sees her fire the gun — at the range, over the top of the Arabic translation of  _The Grapes of Wrath_ , and no he’s not sure whether that choice was a joke or not, as he doesn’t recall making it — it jolts him again. 

When they get home, Joan’s hand bruised from the grip and her face calm and settled in a way he hasn’t seen much lately, he calls the woman again. Same results, same ache and smile, same feeling of satisfaction when she leaves. This is what worries him.

“I fear,” he says, not looking her in the eye, “that I may be sexually excited by the image of you with a gun.”

She blanches, just a little. “Is it me with a gun, or anyone with a gun?”

A good question. “I don’t know, actually.” He stares into the middle distance and comes back when he hears,

“Do some research, Sherlock, is what I’m saying.” She’s not frowning. She stands up, brushes her hands gingerly down her leggings, favoring the bruised heel of one.

“Yes, quite.” He looks her in the eye for the first time since the range, and she doesn’t seem to be afraid or disgusted, just…concerned. 

—-

Research proves fruitful. 

“Small people, delicate hands with guns. It’s the juxtaposition, I believe,” he says, out of breath and excited, looking her in the eye as she stays seated. “The power and danger with their delicacy, I think that’s it, the polar opposites.”

“Good.” She smiles, the first real smile in days. “Because you know—”

“Yes, obviously, of course.” He smiles back, wide and easy, and when she stands and places a fine-boned hand on his shoulder, he feels himself start to slip into that perfect, quiet space in his head. “You know my proclivities.”

“And you know mine.” The hand is gone, and his head is bowed. He stays like that for a while — loses time, if he’s honest with himself — and when he comes back Joan has made him a sandwich and a mug of tea, and they are waiting for him, cold of course.

The next time he calls the woman, he asks her about the dichotomy. Of course, he’s gasping between words, gasping and sobbing and moaning, so it is no doubt difficult to understand. But she responds, says she doesn’t personally get off on it, but others do. “Everything’s fine,” she says with a smile, and proceeds to bring him to a finish with a cruel twist of one hand. “Whatever you need.”

—-

Joan is shot in December. She kills the man, three quick bullets, but collapses, bleeding, her face white, and Sherlock calls an ambulance and cowers over her, presses hard where she tells him to, counts seconds, babbles about the shooter’s childhood home and occupation and everything else, and she coughs out a laugh before passing out, and the ambulance attendants take her away from him and won’t let him ride with her. 

He could kill them with his bare hands.

Gregson appears as if from nowhere, Bell in tow, and offers him a ride, and Sherlock lays in the backseat visualizing the ambulance workers’ ministrations, mentally ticking off the ways they could kill Joan without even meaning to. He feels the panic rising in him, hears his breath quickening, notices his hands shake. He wants heroin, he wants alcohol, he wants something to numb this until he can see Joan. 

Bell has a sixth sense, Joan says, and in that terrible moment Sherlock believes it, because the detective begins to argue with Sherlock about a trivial deduction made days ago. The bickering distracts him — not entirely, but enough to keep him from stabbing himself through the thigh or begging Gregson to pull over so he can buy something, anything.

They arrive at the hospital. The doctors recognized Joan. She’ll be fine — she’s strong — she’s in surgery now — she’s a fighter. Words swirl through and around and Sherlock would kill someone with his bare hands right now, easily and without remorse, if doing so would ensure Joan’s health and safety. He would smile as he did it and present himself to her for, no doubt, an incredibly stern lecture and her turning him in to the police, because Joan is lawful and good in all the ways Sherlock cannot be bothered to be, and he could accept that, even, happily, no complaints, if it would work. But logic tells him it wouldn’t, and so he doesn’t. 

—-

Joan is fine. She keeps telling him so. She’s fine.

He is not fine. He refuses to take cases out of the house, refuses to leave the premises. When Joan tries to, he looks so broken and terrified that she relents, stays home, invites the person over instead. Days pass, then weeks. 

“We’re leaving the house today, Sherlock. I know you’re having trouble dealing with my — with what happened to me.” She can’t say it either, but in a contest of mental health and wellness Sherlock is rather like a two-legged horse in the Kentucky Derby.

“I don’t care to go anywhere. The Metropolitans are playing tonight, we could make curry, it’d be lovely. Go over those unsolved cannibalism cases from upstate?” He smiles, puts on his hopeful face.

Thirty-five minutes later they are seated in a small booth in an Italian restaurant. She orders rabbit stew. He orders a hamburger, and at her frown, orders it in flawless Italian. The waiter laughs. “See?” Sherlock says as the man leaves.

“Shut up. Tell me about the cannibalism cases.” 

“Over dinner?” He fiddles with a fork. “You are becoming an investigator, aren’t you?”

“Strong stomach,” she says, grinning sharp and dangerous.

That night, when he calls the woman, Joan stays in her room. The woman tears him to shreds, leaves him sobbing, is unusually gentle with him afterwards. It’s the first time he’s called her since the range. “Feel better, darling,” she says, a pat on the head as he lays in child’s pose on the floor, breathing deeply, forehead burning against the cool wood floor.

When he wakes up in his own bed, Joan has left him a bowl of curry and a mug of tea. They are cold, and they are his, and he nods back off with a sigh of contentment. 

—-

“Would you ever even consider it?” He follows behind her like a small dog, her brisk stride uninterrupted by the gun at the small of her back, the second — recently acquired — at her left ankle, the knife at her belt, or the other knife in her coat’s inner left breast pocket. She is a walking arsenal these days, and he never feels safe, but Joan has killed five men in her time with him, and will kill as many more as needs must.

“No.” Flat.

“Why not?” 

She stops, wheels on him. “Why do you want me to?”

“I don’t want you to, I want to know why you won’t consider it.” Petulant, and he cringes at it but it’s too late and besides it’s not like he isn’t actually a whining child sometimes.

She ticks off reasons on her long, delicate fingers. “One, power imbalance—”

“You haven’t been my sober companion for six months.” 

“Two,” ignoring him, “I don’t do dom/sub stuff, it’s not my scene. Three, I am not attracted to you.”

“It’s not about sex. It’s about power, or safety, or whatever you get out of it. I am not going to say you’re not attractive, lest I prove a liar, but it’s not about that. It’s something much deeper.” He grounds his feet, stands as tall as possible. “I’m not even asking you to. I don’t want you to, I want you to think about why you might want to.”

“Not my scene, Sherlock.” She turns and walks away. From her gait and the way she’s holding her head, something has spooked her. “Red coat,” she mutters, and he sees who she means.

“Unarmed, Wants to catcall you, but won’t — he just saw the knife flash on your belt.” 

Her shoulders settle into more relaxed lines. “You don’t want me to? You promise?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“It’s not my thing, but I have read up on it. For you, I mean — your psychology.”

“And?”

“I can see the appeal for you, Sherlock. And I support you.”

“But.”

“Not for me. Not my thing. I can be dominant with you on a personal level because I know that’s what you respond best to, but in a sexual—”

“It wouldn’t be about sex—”

“On a sexual level, in a sexual relationship, in anything more than what we have now, I would be uncomfortable. I would be unhappy.” She peers over her shoulder at him, the lines of her cheekbones like razorblades. “If you ask me to, honestly ask me, tell me you need it, I would do it. But I would be unhappy. Is that what you want?”

The question is settled, never brought up again. Sometimes, in flashes, her voice will change, her body language will shift, and Sherlock feels the submissive part of him jump to attention. He craves her approval no less than he ever has. He and the woman set up a semi-regular session, and in the mornings there is a sandwich and tea, or curry and a coffee, or a bottle of water and some aspirin. There are bullets and blades and broken bones, and soon enough they’ve seen the other naked enough to form the aggregate picture, and they’ve shared beds and chairs and floors and alleyways, but sex in any sense never enters into it. It would make Joan unhappy. That is the final line, the one Sherlock will not cross.

Rain still smells wrong, but New York looks more and more like home every year.

**Author's Note:**

> [title from "Devil and the Deed" by Yeasayer]


End file.
